Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "[High Soft] Lisp has its share of tender moments and tragic ones, although it’s relatively buoyant with humor throughout. ... This is the stuff of soap operas, minus the melodrama. Lisp comes loaded with palpable emotions and heaps of honesty, even amid a cartoony backdrop." – Rod Lott, Bookgasm

• Review: "Part one of a proposed trilogy, King Of The Flies Vol. 1: Hallorave is an extremely promising title from French crime comics artists Pascal “Mezzo” Mesenburg and Michel Pirus. ... Its approach to violence and turmoil is surprisingly fresh, although the story bears obvious debts to David Lynch, and the art just as obvious ones to Charles Burns; it all combines in surprising, powerful ways. ...King Of The Flies is a fascinating new take on the nearly exhausted subject of youthful alienation… B+" – The A.V. Club

• Interview: At The Comics Journal, the conclusion of Matt Thorn's Moto Hagio interview from TCJ #269

• Interviewer: Over at his Profanity Hill concern, our own Jason T. Miles picks the brain of Sparkplug Comic Books publisher Dylan Williams about the business and ethics of independent comics

• Event plug: "If there's a greater comics-related joy to be had on an early Spring Saturday sipping beers, hanging out in Seattle's cartooning headquarters, finding out you're standing next to Jim Woodring while occasionally taking a focused gander at Beto's originals, I haven't been informed as to what that might be." – Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter